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The first thing Anne Rodgers wants every woman who reads her book about sex to know is that she is normal.

For “Kiss and Tell: Secrets of Sexual Desire from Women 15 to 97” (Soft Spot Press, $18.95), Rodgers surveyed 1,300 women in South Florida about what stimulates desire, what they think about during sex and what they would not want to do. She then conducted in-person interviews of 100 of the respondents and they shared the most intimate details of their lives. Gynecologist Maureen Whelihan, who co-authored the book, provides the biological reasons behind some of the answers.

Rodgers, a former Austin American-Statesman editor, met Whelihan while working at the Palm Beach Post and reporting about mature women’s issues. She found Whelihan unique in that she asked her patients not just about whether they are sexually active but also how they felt about their sex life. Whelihan’s patients became the survey takers and interviewees.

Rodgers will talk about the book and her research Friday at BookPeople.

Rodgers breaks the book down by decades, first exploring what the teens have experienced and ending with what the 90-year-olds think about sex now and throughout their lives. She tried to find women of diverse backgrounds. Most are straight, but some are lesbians or have had relationships with women in the past. Some have been in the swinger lifestyle, and one has been an escort. Some have been sexually abused. The women are married, divorced, never married and widowed. Their racial backgrounds also vary.

She wanted readers to be able to find themselves in the book, especially in women in their current decade.

The book is full of honest details about preferred positions, methods, number of lovers, etc. “It was eye-opening,” Rodgers says. “It was a blast. It was so fun because the women I interviewed … were so candid, so compelling, so willing to give me the intimate details of their lives. It was so fascinating for me.”

She wrote the book as if the women were characters in a novel, she says. Each of the women got to choose her alias, and she could control what went into the book and what got left out.

Among one of the biggest surprises for Rodgers was why women decided to have sex for the first time. Teens and women in their 20s didn’t talk about lust or desire, unlike the women in their 80s and 90s. Instead, these younger women talked about not wanting to go into high school a virgin, or feeling like they had dated their boyfriend for six months and it was the natural progression.

“They were not having their bodies telling them they are ready,” she says. Instead, it’s more societal and cultural pressure.

Also surprising was the women in their 80s and 90s who admitted to having had very active sex lives before marriage. “Some were very adventurous,” she says. They were breaking down the stereotypes of their age. The myth that women that age are no longer sexually active also was dispelled.

Rodgers did have to take a more gentle approach in her questioning of older women versus the teens and twentysomethings who were not shy about talking about sex with her.

Interestingly, she discovered that unlike what “Sex and the City” might depict, even younger women don’t talk about sex with their friends. And their doctors also aren’t asking about it, other than if they are sexually active. Rodgers sees this as a missed opportunity at the gynecologist office.

Rodgers, who grew up in a conservative household, says the book changed her own comfort level with talking about sex. “The more you talk about it, the easier it comes and the more natural it is. Sex is very natural … it’s so nice to be able to talk about it without blushing or feeling squeamish in our stomach. It became very liberating.”

And under the category of what’s “normal,” Rodgers found that “most women have had good sex and bad sex” and everything in between.